MY MOTHER’S friend Linda is tall, thin, elegant, and very smart. She is also frank, as my mother was; part of what made their friendship tick was a fast, funny, often startling mutual candor. The night before my mother died, when we all knew she was dying and she’d been slipping farther and farther away from consciousness all day, Linda came into the hushed and darkened hospital room, put her face close to my mother’s, and said, “So tell me: What was the point of spending all that money on the new custom-made motorized wheelchair if you’re not even going to be around to use it?’’ And my mother opened her eyes and laughed.
They were friends for almost 50 years. They met when they were in their 30s, in the Connecticut suburb where they’d moved because of their husbands’ jobs. They gave dinner parties, drove kids to swimming lessons, volunteered for the League of Women Voters. They moved to different towns, again because of their husbands’ jobs, and once the kids were older, they got jobs themselves. Through the decades they talked on the phone, visited occasionally, drove long distances to meet for lunch.
I never expected that Linda and I would become friends. But in the two and a half years since my mother died, that’s what has happened. It’s not like any other friendship I have. It’s not about work, or children, or common interests, or shared sensibilities. It’s about an absence.
We send each other Christmas and birthday cards. She calls me around the anniversary of my mother’s death. And there are other phone calls too — filling each other in on the details of our lives. I ask about her grandchildren and her work; she asks about my kids and my writing. It’s warm and chatty, but it’s always a little awkward. There’s a wistfulness between me and Linda, a feeling almost of shouting to be heard across a vast distance. As much true affection as there is in these conversations, there is also the unspoken acknowledgement that we don’t quite do it for each other. Linda can’t quite scratch the itch I have for my mother, and I can’t quite scratch the itch she has for her friend.
In some ways I suppose these conversations are failures, but they’re poignant, gentle, and beautiful failures. Thank goodness we don’t succeed, that we’re not easily tossing jazzy verbal darts back and forth, as my mother and Linda did, or that Linda hasn’t tried to become a second mother to me. It’s as if we are marking the place where my mother stood, reminding each other of how important she was, and at the same time reminding ourselves that she was irreplaceable.
Once when my sister went off for a day to a college reunion, she left her 9-month-old with my parents. I happened to be visiting, and the baby, after crying disconsolately for his mother, fastened on me as the person who was closest to her in looks and age. He followed me around the house, crawling into my lap whenever I sat down. Maybe he just liked me, but I could have sworn that his mute, besotted gaze was also fiercely sad, as if he were saying, “I know you’re not her, but you’re as close as I can get at the moment. Pretend, damn it.’’
I suspect it happens a lot, this near-miss aspect of mourning. It’s an indirect yet powerful way of honoring an absence. It happens in our personal lives, and in public life, too: Think of all the politicians we compare to JFK or the writers we hail as the new Jane Austen. It begins with what Freud called transference — the unconscious redirection of old feelings toward a new object — but it also includes a rueful awareness that the redirection isn’t quite working, that the resemblance both is and isn’t satisfying. Someone dies. A lover breaks up with you. A friend moves across the country. Your mom goes off to a college reunion. And you find someone who at once fills the space and, by failing to fill it perfectly, affirms its emptiness.
Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Her website is www.joanwickersham.com.
Aimée van Drimmelen/For the boston globe
